Ulysses: Amazon.co.uk: James Joyce, Lawrence Rainey: Books

Amazon.co.uk Review

Ulysses has been labelled dirty, blasphemous and unreadable. In a famous 1933 court decision, Judge John M. Woolsey declared it an emetic book--although he found it not quite obscene enough to disallow its importation into the United States--and Virginia Woolf was moved to decry James Joyce's "cloacal obsession". None of these descriptions, however, do the slightest justice to the novel. To this day it remains the modernist masterpiece, in which the author takes both Celtic lyricism and vulgarity to splendid extremes. It is funny, sorrowful, and even (in its own way) suspenseful. And despite the exegetical industry that has sprung up in the last 75 years, Ulysses is also a compulsively readable book. Even the verbal vaudeville of the final chapters can be navigated with relative ease, as long as you're willing to be buffeted, tickled, challenged and (occasionally) vexed by Joyce's astonishing command of the English language.

Among other things, a novel is simply a long story, and the first question about any story is "What happens?" In the case of Ulysses, the answer could be "Everything". William Blake, one of literature's sublime myopics, saw the universe in a grain of sand. Joyce saw it in Dublin, Ireland, on June 16, 1904, a day distinguished by its utter normality. Two characters, Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom, go about their separate business, crossing paths with a gallery of inforgettable Dubliners. We watch them teach, eat, loiter, argue and (in Bloom's case) masturbate. And thanks to the book's stream- of-consciousness technique--which suggests no mere stream but an impossibly deep, swift-running river-- we're privy to their thoughts, emotions and memories. The result? Almost every variety of human experience is crammed into the accordion-folds of a single day, which makes Ulysses not just an experimental work but the very last word in realism.

Both characters add their glorious intonations to the music of Joyce's prose. Dedalus's accent--that of a freelance aesthetician, who dabbles here and there in what we might call "Early Yeats Lite"-- will be familiar to readers of Portrait of an Artist As a Young Man. But Bloom's wistful sensualism (and naïve curiosity) is something else entirely. Seen through his eyes, a rundown corner of a Dublin graveyard is a figure for hope and hopelessness, mortality and dogged survival: "Mr Bloom walked unheeded along his grove by saddened angels, crosses, broken pillars, family vaults, stone hopes praying with upcast eyes, old Ireland's hearts and hands. More sensible to spend the money on some charity for the living. Pray for the repose of the soul of. Does anybody really?" --James Marcus --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

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19 of 20 people found the following review helpful

An Extraordinary Experience 21 Mar 2008

By D. Cottam

Format:Audio CD

Like many, I have tried reading the book and found it quite tough.Jim Norton makes the text come to life and team with unforgettable characters. His voice is an extraordinary instrument capable of conveying every emotional nuance and moments of great humour. His reading is an amazing tour de force.He has an inexhaustible range of voices in all registers from velvety bass to falsetto. He conveys the multilayered prose with complete ease deploying many voices to convey a sense of place, inner thoughts and an astonishing cast of characters, each with a unique and distinctive timbre, register and accent.Bloom emerges as a deeply sympathetic and vulnerable human being.
Marcella Riordan is also marvellous as Molly. She is vividly realised and her soliloquy becomes a fascinating and erotic experience. Despite their considerable length, I have already enjoyed these discs several times and find each repetition more illuminating.I now understand why this book has achieved its legendary status. This reading is, perhaps, the most remarkable piece of storytelling I have ever heard.

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25 of 27 people found the following review helpful

One of the better editions of Ulysses 9 Nov 1999

By A Customer

Format:Paperback

Ulysses was first published in 1922 and has since been recognized as a masterpiece of world literature - albeit one full of typos. The book was first printed in France, and its printers, faced with a difficult text in a language they didn't understand, allowed many small typing errors to make their way onto the page. The edition featured here is the result of a concerted effort to remove as many of these errors as possible. How well it succeeds in doing so has been the subject of much scholarly debate in recent years.

From its first appearance in the 1980s this edition was referred to as the "corrected text" and as such it has attracted much attention; several of its "corrections" have been called into question by Joycean scholars. However in my opinion -- and I am a Ulysses fan, not a professional expert -- it remains one of the better editions available.

It's fair to say that most readers need not worry about the particular edition of Ulysses they read. The typos that persist in different editions are insignificant when compared to the deliberate inventions and irregularities of the author, and the strength and beauty of the novel shine through regardless of the occasional misspelling. However there are now more editions of Ulysses available than ever, and in my humble opinion it's worth taking five minutes to check out the attributes of edition that you might buy. (There is one edition for example that I wouldn't touch with a long pole.) This edition has received its bouquets and brickbats in the last couple of decades but I think it's definitely worth considering.

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42 of 46 people found the following review helpful

Twenty years after 2 Feb 2003

I'm just completing a re-reading of Ulysses twenty years after reading it as a student, and I'm amazed at how much I'm enjoying it. Yes, it's difficult and packed with allusions to literature, religion and philosophy that I've no idea about. But the sheer poetry of the writing, the humour and the inclusive passion for experience and existence, thought and emotion, have carried me over the difficult passages. 80 years after it was written there's still nothing to compare with Ulysses in its daring, scope and formal experimentation. If you want to understand the modern novel at all, start here.